One of the highlights of Czech writing on the recent past has been the oral history project conducted by Miroslav Vaněk, Pavel Mücke, and their teams of interviewers at the Institute of Contemporary History and at Charles University, in Prague. The project has collected the life stories of several dozen former Czechoslovak Communist Party functionaries and dissidents; of 300 “ordinary people” born in the 1935–1955 period; and of 100 students active in the 1989 revolution. Thousands of pages of transcription have been published in Czech, accompanied by several collections of interpretive essays. The book under review here offers a snapshot of the “ordinary” folk, from the generation that had to adapt in early adulthood to the post-1968 “normalization” and then in middle age to the post-1989 transition to capitalism.
The picture that emerges from these conversations is a splendid representation of the ambiguous collective memory of the Communist period and...